What happens when we
must plan for massive disaster but have no experience, no clue about
how to go about it? Mission Improbable enters the world of
managers and experts who think they can rebuild societies after
nuclear war, who think they can evacuate huge numbers of people
after nuclear meltdowns, and who think they can cleanup huge oil
spills. It is a world of whimsy and fantasy, a world where people
have to think they can control the uncontrollable.

Unlike other fantasies,
though, these fantasies are important because people represent them
as real promises that can be kept. These promises are folded into
plans, which Lee Clarke dubs "fantasy documents." Complex,
highly interactive systems increasingly insinuate themselves into
society. The justifications that are attached to those systems often
mask failures that we need to see more clearly. Fantasy documents
are used to convince audiences that dangerous systems are safe,
that experts are in charge, that all is well. Fantasy documents
make danger seem normal by allowing organizations and experts to
claim that the problems are under control.

How does the U.S. Post
Office make a plan to deliver mail after atomic Armageddon? How
do oil industry executives make promises that they can collect 10
million gallons of oil spilled in the ocean? How do regulators try
to convince people that everyone can be evacuated from congested
Long Island after a nuclear power plant destroys itself? Doing these
things requires that experts reconstruct history and fabricate tales
that demonstrate that they have the right kind of knowledge and
experience to get the job done.

Mission Improbable
has a novel view of planning and prediction, one that emphasizes
the rhetorical nature of managers' and experts' promises. Though
people are increasingly skeptical of big organizations they have
no choice but to depend on them for protection from big dangers,
so they expect their experts to tell the truth. But the reassuring
rhetoric these soothsayers construct under the guise of expert prediction
may have no basis in fact or experience - the circumstances are
unprecedented - and thus may not include the interests of society.
Provocative and written for a general audience, Mission Improbable
makes the case that society would be safer, smarter, and fairer
if our organizations and their masters could admit their limitations,
declaring frankly that they can not control the uncontrollable.